The start signal hadn’t sounded, but the prohibitive favourite to win the men’s 1,500-metre freestyle swimming race, China’s Sun Yang, was gone from his block and in the water.

And Ryan Cochrane, who had only a faint hope of a gold medal coming in, must have thought: Wait a minute. False start? Does this mean … ?

His whole country was surely thinking it.

“I was so scared,” the 20-year-old Chinese said later. “It was all black before my eyes.”

Cochrane, though, said he wasn’t making any assumptions.

“I kind of assumed he wouldn’t be out, just because of the way he went into the water, but I was kind of surprised how quickly they got us back on the blocks,” the 23-year-old from Victoria said Saturday after swimming the race of his life to hold off Beijing Olympic champion Oussama Mellouli and win the silver medal behind the world-record swim of the untouchable Sun.

The referee, it seems, had asked the crowd to be quiet after the swimmers had taken their mark, and Sun toppled off the block.

“It is what it is. We prepare for anything,” Cochrane said. “[Sun] was pretty pissed off by it, I think, but it’s such a little thing in the grand scheme, and it’s going to be 15 minutes of pain no matter what, so … he got his feet wet first.”

There was no raining on Cochrane’s mood after his silver made it a Super Saturday for Canada — a gold-silver-bronze day that bumped the team’s medal count to 10, for 11th place in the total medals table.

“I was just so thankful to know that there’s nothing else I could have done.”

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Truly Sun — who also won the 400 metres, a silver at 200 and a bronze in the 4×200 relay — left in a hurry and never looked back. Cochrane hung with him for a while, but eventually settled into a second-place race with South Korea’s Park Taehwan, shed him about the halfway mark, and then hunkered down for the grim battle to deny Mellouli.

With 100 metres left, it looked as though the Tunisian might catch him, but Cochrane reached into his reserves and sprinted home in a Canadian record of 14 minutes, 39.63 seconds — less than 0.7 seconds ahead of Mellouli, but well behind Sun, whose 14:31 beat his own world record by more than three seconds.

“It was a tough fight the last 100 metres, but I also knew the first half felt so good that I was going to have some stuff left in the tank,” Cochrane said. “When [Mellouli] passed me in Beijing, I wasn’t expecting it. This time, I was going to fight probably to the death to make sure he didn’t get ahead of me.

“But I did have memories of what it was like in Beijing when I was fighting for that third-place spot, so I knew I was going to have to sprint that last 50 — and that’s what we train every day for.

“I knew I had to be out hard, but I didn’t want to go out too hard and fall into a heap, I just wanted to be sure I didn’t leave anything in the pool,” he said. “When I was feeling good around the 700-metre mark, I knew it was time to test the waters every 100-150 metres, and it felt good every time I did it, and it’s nice to say, because usually it feels terrible.

“I knew, going into it, ‘This is going to be an excruciating swim.’ But it wasn’t like Beijing, where I hit the 1,100-metre mark and I was in so much pain, I didn’t even know what to do.”

Cochrane’s unexpected bronze in Beijing at age 19 salvaged what could have been a disastrous meet for Canada. This one capped a week that was somewhat better, with Brent Hayden’s gritty bronze in the 100-metre free and seven swimmers reaching finals.

But it was still the first silver medal by a Canadian in an Olympic pool since Marianne Limpert’s 200-metre individual medley at Atlanta, 16 years ago, and that’s hard to believe.

“It’s a double-edged sword, because part of me wanted to be five seconds faster and vying for that world record,” Cochrane said.

“When I was young, I thought I could do anything, and then the years go by and you keep on getting second place, and you think, ‘Maybe this is the best I can do,’” he said, having followed up his Beijing bronze with runner-up medals at the 2009 and 2011 world championships.

“And I know this was second place, too, but I’m still progressing — to be faster than four years ago, without the [body] suits, I think is fantastic.”

He’s been right there, all along, and that’s why he was as sure a thing as Canada had in the pool, coming in. Swimming Canada projected “two to three” medals for the London Games, but the second and third were hopes, rather than expectations. Cochrane was carrying those.

The 1,500 is about work, and mileage, and the ability to suffer — and it’s less susceptible to the vagaries of a poor start or a rough turn or two, or five. It’s about stroke rate and stamina and stubborn tenacity. He had all that.

Cochrane had failed to qualify for the final of the 400 metres on the opening day of this meet — a race in which he had given himself an outside chance at a medal — “so I knew I had to go out with a bang or I wasn’t going to be happy with the whole experience,” he said.

“The 400, I thought, was a lost opportunity, but there’s no point being devastated about it for days on end when you know you have your best race coming up. I underestimated how hard the mental side of this meet would be. I thought with experience it would be easier; in the end it was a lot harder.”